Inside story

The agitators

In the late 60s, revolution was in the air at the LSE. Students, inspired by global protests, occupied buildings and fought the authorities. As they meet up again, John Mair asks what the class of 68 really achieved

It is a school reunion, but this one will be different. The late-middle-aged men and women who will gather in London next Saturday will be remembering a series of events that changed their, and many others', lives: "les evenements", or the student protests of 1968 and 1969 at the London School of Economics.

It's hard to believe at 35 years' distance, but back then they believed they were the vanguard of a worldwide revolution, with students first, and workers to follow. De Gaulle had nearly fallen in France in May thanks to student power at the Sorbonne, and Harold Wilson could not be far behind, toppled by the LSE. "London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, we shall fight and we shall win!" they chanted, as they stormed off from an occupied LSE to protest against the Vietnam war on October 27, 1968.

Today the "vanguardistas" are professors, authors, teachers, journalists, MBEs, OBEs, housewives and unemployed. The group will include at least two MPs (one Tory), a Church of England vicar and one Lady (Elizabeth Vallance). But just what were the utopian hopes of the class of 68, and where are the dramatis personae now?

Today, Martin Shaw (BA, Sociology 1968) is professor of international relations and global politics at the University of Sussex; Tom Bower (LLB, 1969) is the distinguished anti-biographer of Robert Maxwell, Richard Branson, Mohammed al Fayed and English football; Martin Tomkinson (BSc International Relations, 1968) is a freelance investigative journalist who works mainly on researching the rich; and Colin Crouch (BA Sociology, 1967) is the head of the department of social and political science at the European Institute in Florence. Back in 68, they were on the student barricades together. Crouch was the voice of moderation, the others the voices of revolution. The LSE then was full of political debate, discussion and conflicting views.

Tom Bower believes 1968 was a watershed, "a seminal moment in Britain's social history. It created students who were cynics: dissatisfied and non-conformist."

"These were the best years of my life," says Tomkinson, one of the leftwing leaders of 68, and who was once banned for life from the school for, literally, storming its barricades.

"That spirit of rough democracy and tolerance was a heady experience. It taught me that people can and do change under the impact of external events. Human nature is not a given but infinitely malleable."

Shaw came to the LSE as the Catholic son of a provincial professor. He "found" Marxism and the International Socialists. He became one of the LSE student leaders and a fellow injunctee of Tomkinson: "I wrote an article, 'The Remaking of Socialist Politics' by Martin Shaw. One of my friends suggested that it should be 'The Remaking of Martin Shaw,' by Socialist Politics. For the activists, these were life-changing experiences, which have shaped the way we've thought about the world to this day."

It was utopia at the end of the Kingsway rainbow for a period; the feeling that anything was possible, all dreams realisable, permeated the entire student body. Tomkinson combined two Welsh passions. He was a revolutionary socialist by day, but on Wednesday afternoons he was a mean rugby player (alongside another Welshman and socialist rebel, Clive Jones, who today controls ITV). He recalls when the political truly became the personal for one policeman.

"I played rugby with his two colleagues, but barely spoke to this guy who was married with four kids. After he had left, one of his rugby-playing colleagues saw me and called me 'a bastard'. I asked why and he said that his friend, who was called Karl, had decided that he could no longer serve the capitalist state, and, risking his future pension etc, had quit the police force. And this was all the fault of me and my friends."

But why the LSE? For much of 1967, 1968 and 1969 the students were fighting the school authorities. It all culminated in the "smashing of the gates" on January 24 1969. The university, in an attempt to prevent students occupying its buildings, had erected gates around the campus; the protesters promptly took iron bars and knocked them down. The authorities closed the school down and injuncted the student leaders, including Tomkinson and Shaw, against setting foot on the premises.

It re-opened within a month, but the scars would remain. The LSE had a celebrated radical tradition as the hothouse for Labour and developing world liberation leaders over the previous 70 years, but by the 60s it had lost much of that. The spirit of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and the legendary socialist and LSE lecturer Harold Laski, had become that of the rightwing economist (Lord) Lionel Robbins (responsible for university expansion in the 1960s) and Walter Adams, the former principal of University College Rhodesia, by then director of the LSE. By that time Michael Oakeshott, the distinguished conservative philosopher, held Laski's chair.

The 68 LSE generation was determined to recapture the high ground and turn it back to radicalism. "Having found, to our horror, that [the school was no longer a radical hotbed], we resolved to make it one, or at least try to," says Tomkinson today. Crouch blames sociology. "It had a particular concentration of social scientists - the people who think most about these things - and it had an undeserved reputation for radicalism that self-selected us."

Add to that a youthful concern about world events, such as the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa, and the inspiration of "student power" demonstrations worldwide, and the radical spark soon became a bush fire, though as Martin Tomkinson notes, "it helped that Fleet Street was a stone's throw away so that the hacks could stagger along and give us the oxygen of publicity."

Students at the school had been revolting since 1967. They called it a "pedagogic gerontocracy", and demanded power on academic committees and changes to certain courses. But why did it all happen anyway? Surely this was a secure generation without material worries? Colin Crouch puts the whole movement down to challenges to the status quo. "We resented the exercise of authority and power without participation, and believed that we could assert that demand without fear".

Tomkinson sees deeper causes. "The core meaning of 'les evenements' was a strident protest against the world our elders had bequeathed us - Vietnam, the prevalent class system in higher education, plus a smug and unmerited feeling of academic superiority ("objectivity") that permeated the LSE at that time. If nothing else, we punctured that."

Those demands, that revolutionary air, made the LSE of 68 a fertile recruiting ground for the far-left and in particular the International Socialists, now trading as the Socialist Workers' Party. Leftist faction fought leftist faction in the students' union and corridors of the school. (This author well remembers furious - and futile - discussion about whether the Soviet Union was a "deformed workers' state" or just simply a "capitalist" one.)

Shaw, then a willing IS recruit, says: "1968 led a generation of young intellectuals away from traditional social democracy, out of the Labour party and (in many cases) into what proved to be the dead-end of far-left groups, although many of them eventually returned to Labour and (ironically) played a part in the development of New Labour in the 1990s. Many of us moved on to different kinds of political position in later life." But the Kingsway utopia - cynics called it "a revolutionary kindergarten" - could not last, and it didn't.

As they settle down to their reminiscences on Saturday (not, significantly, in the LSE Old Theatre, the crucible for so many vital debates of that annus mirabilis, but in the Hong Kong Theatre bequeathed to the school by wealthy far eastern alumni), the Old Utopians can look forward to the wine-tasting immediately afterwards and a formal dinner at the House of Commons that night. But just what have these enemies reunited achieved, apart from the pedestrianisation of Houghton Street, around which the university is situated?

"In a curious way, it is neo-liberalism and capitalism that have made the main gains," says Crouch. "There has been a shift from authority as such towards the use of market forces as the means through which power is exercised."

"We helped to make a lot of changes that later generations take for granted," adds Shaw. For Tomkinson, the heady days of 1968 are a period that remain unsurpassed. "Future generations have been, and are openly envious of those who lived through these 'happenings'."